Relying on University of Michigan data on consumers.in.ation expectations, we establish some stylized facts on the process of in.ation expectation formation across different demographic groups. Percentile time series models are employed to test for rationality and to study learning dynamics...

The paper studies how risks specific to a nuclear power investment in liberalised markets – regulatory, construction, operation and market risks – can be mitigated or transferred away from the plant investor through different contractual and organisational arrangements. It argues that...

This paper discusses whether a new paradigm is necessary for independent economic regulation of electricity (and closely associated natural gas) systems. We begin by summarising the nature of the traditional model of electricity reform and the place of economic regulation within it. Next we...

It is puzzling today to explain diversity and imperfection of actual transmission monopoly designs in competitive electricity markets. We argue that transmission monopoly in competitive electricity markets has to be analysed within a Wilson (2002) modular framework. Applied to the management of...

Supply Function Equilibria (SFE) offer an attractive equilibrium concept for an electricity Pool in which all suppliers receive the market clearing price and are an important tool for examining market power. It is helpful to have analytical solutions available for simple models to explore market...

Extending the basic model of two-stage cumulative innovation with asymmetric information to include `experimentation' by second-stage rms, we nd that the costs of a strong (versus weak) intellectual property (IP) regime may be substantially increased. In addition, these costs increase as...

This paper shows that convexity of the short-run Phillips curve is a source of positive inflation bias even when policymakers target the natural unemployment rate, that is when they operate with prudent discretion, and their loss function is symmetric. Optimal monetary policy also induces...

In the canonical monetary policy model, money is endogenous to the optimal path for interest rates and output. But when liquidity provision by banks dominates the demand for transactions money from the real economy, money is likely to contain information for future output and inflation because...

The paper provides an overview of the generation of electricity in 10 countries in South East Europe during 1995-2004. Using the latest available statistics the potential of the nascent integration of the electricity markets in South East Europe is explored. We conduct a cross-country analysis...

Most philosophers and social scientists argue that the relationship between life satisfaction and its determinants is intermediated by cultural drivers (education, race, gender, religion, regional cultural background, etc.) and that (as suggested by descriptive evidence on "frustrated...